There are some helpful sites that I am at a lost to see how they ‘monetise’ their work. TinyURL.com being one of them. Or rather, I’m amazed that people are sensible enough not to be too greedy.
This is such a useful site that I use all the time, and have seen being used by countless others, I’m amazed it hasn’t been bought by Google. That said, I suppose they get a pretty penny from the Adsense ads. I really wonder who gives money by those donation buttons. I have once, so with billion’s of hits I suppose a tiny fraction giving a tiny amount makes it a good business.
I’m intrigued how it ‘never expires’ either. Gosh, people are clever.
16 January 2008 at 12:20 pm
Interesting post.
TinyURL will run out of URLs eventually, but not any time soon. I guess they will just add another character on the end, which will increase the possible codes by a factor of however many characters they use each time.
My real problem with services such as TinyURL is that they become a “single point of failure”, which kind of goes against the ethic of the internet having distributed name servers… think about it – if their website goes down, nobody’s URLs work…
17 January 2008 at 9:20 am
Good point. And what I’d love to know is how much it costs for them to host the location that keeps all this data; because I am very nosey.
So you’re saying their claim of ‘never expires’ is probably false then? I suppose ‘will expire sometime in the dark and distant future or when we get bored’ isn’t so catchy.
I expect the fact is that most URLs are only really relevant, particularly those with very long paths, for a year or two. Past that, everything moves on.